The Good Soldier Versus The Crazy Cat Lady

 

From http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/images/kiffie1.jpg

Actually, that’s a slander on crazy cat ladies. Most of them have far more sense than Mary Kiffmeyer, who up until she was voted out last November was Minnesota’s Secretary of State.

How crazy is she? This crazy:

The Star Tribune has a long article today [PW notes: It’s now hidden behind the pay wall under a new URL] about the secretary of state. Not a whole lot is new; it reiterates the fact that many people, including some Republicans, see her as too partisan (her notion that she is “fighting bullies” is laughable). One story that was particularly interesting, one that I did not know, was that she fired her Republican elections director because he invited Democrats as well as Republicans to a presentation on new voting machines (at least that’s his claim). Shocking? Unfortunately, no.

And this crazy:

Last week, when Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer fired off a letter of warning that City Pages’ voter registration drive at the State Fair “may be in violation of federal law,” she highlighted two defining characteristics of her six-year tenure as the state’s top election official: open partisanship and a proclivity for overreaching.

In her one-page August 30 letter, Kiffmeyer cited a section of the federal elections code that prohibits “paying or accepting payment for voting or registering to vote.” Because City Pages offered fairgoers a chance to sign up for a vacation sweepstakes along with providing them the opportunity to register to vote, Kiffmeyer argued, the paper’s actions could be construed as “payment” and, therefore, against the law.

Never mind the tortured reasoning–you didn’t have to register to vote to enter the sweepstakes–and never mind the fact that Kiffmeyer had no statutory authority, as this is a matter of federal law. Set aside the fact that the secretary of state’s office, theoretically at least, ought to be more interested in encouraging voter registration than rooting around the federal codes to discourage it. Kiffmeyer’s stated reason for writing the letter was the strange part.

She was, she declared, writing “at the request” of David Strom, who is president of the conservative Taxpayers League of Minnesota and a longtime associate of Kiffmeyer’s communications director, Kent Kaiser. (Ironically, Strom now says his complaint about City Pages was merely an exercise in political theater and was not rooted in a belief that there was any meaningful violation of the law. For more on that, see Steve Perry’s column, page 8).

Much of her craziness focused on her efforts to keep voter participation down to a bare minimum:

One group Kiffmeyer has alienated consists of the people who must work most closely with her office: the county elections officials. ….

“We’re all extremely frustrated. At some point you just throw up your hands because we’re not at the table. We’re not considered a partner,” observes Patty O’Connor, the director of elections in Blue Earth County and a former co-chair of the state’s Election Administrators Committee. According to O’Connor, that marks a radical departure from the climate under the previous secretary of state, Joan Growe, who routinely dispatched staff to assist local election officers. “That all changed when Mrs. Kiffmeyer took office. We no longer work together. It’s her way or the highway. And we can’t take the highway, because we still have to do the work.”

The complaint is widespread, and surprisingly bipartisan. While fellow Republicans are reluctant to openly pillory Kiffmeyer, some are brutal in not-for-attribution remarks. “Nobody has ever seen anything like this. She sees black helicopters everywhere she looks and she wants to put up as many barriers to voting as she can,” one lobbyist and fellow Republican says flatly. “There isn’t anyone who deals with her who doesn’t see problems. If this election doesn’t go well, I think she’s going to be in big trouble.”

Suffice to say that during her time as SoS, Kiffmeyer was obsessed with hunting down imagined voter-fraud cases to the exclusion of all else.

Which is, of course, why the latest revelations concerning her possible connection to the planned axing of former US Attorney Tom “Good Soldier” Heffelfinger are so interesting:

Here’s the tale, according to The [LA] Times: in the fall of 2004, Minnesota’s Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer issued a directive that tribal ID cards could not be used for voter identification by Native Americans living off reservations. On October 19, 2004, an assistant U.S. attorney in Heffelfinger’s office wrote Joe Rich, the then-chief of the voting rights section in the Civil Rights Division, to raise the alarm about Kiffmeyer’s move. The directive might disproportionately affect Native Americans’ ability to vote, the AUSA wrote, and was a matter of “deep concern” to Heffelfinger.

Rich, a near 40-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division, who retired in 2005 and has been fiercely critical of the division’s political leadership, recommended opening an investigation. The division, after all, is charged with protecting minorities against possible discrimination. But things went downhill from there:

In response, he said, Bradley Schlozman, a political appointee in the department, told Rich “not to do anything without his approval” because of the “special sensitivity of this matter.”Rich responded by suggesting that more information be gathered from voting officials in the Twin Cities area, which includes Minnesota’s two most populous counties.

A message came back from another Republican official in the department, Hans von Spakovsky, saying Rich should not contact the county officials but should instead deal only with the secretary of state’s office.

Von Spakovsky indicated, Rich said, that working with Kiffmeyer’s office reduced the likelihood of a leak to the news media.

The orders from Schlozman and Von Spakovsky, who wielded unusual power in the civil rights division, effectively ended any department inquiry, Rich said.

So Schlozman and Von Spakovsky, in their own typically creative way, spiked the investigation. (A suit by the ACLU eventually blocked Kiffmeyer’s directive from being implemented.)

Now, this was in October of 2004. And Heffelfinger, along with twelve other U.S. attorneys, appeared on Kyle Sampson’s first list of U.S. attorneys in February of 2005 — that’s the one where “strong” U.S.A.s were ones who had “exhibited loyalty” to the president. Heffelfinger appeared again on a January, 2006 list and stepped down the next month. He’s said he was not asked to step down.

Both Schlotzman and Von Spakovsky are scheduled to testify before Congress soon concerning their roles in the U.S. Attorney purgings. Let’s hope that Keith Ellison gets them on the record about Kiffmeyer’s duel with Heffelfinger.